Claude sent almost four times more referral traffic to websites in April than in January, per new SE Ranking data.
That made it the fastest-growing AI traffic source among the five platforms tracked. It’s still the smallest by a wide margin, and it probably isn’t a meaningful line in your analytics yet.
For transparency, SE Ranking sells AI visibility tracking tools. The figures come from its own Google Analytics dataset.
What The Data Shows
Claude’s share of traffic in SE Ranking’s dataset grew from 0.0029% in January to 0.0141% in April, a 386% increase.
Most of that came in March, when Claude’s share went from 0.0049% to 0.0127%. SE Ranking says that’s the largest single-month jump in Claude’s history across its dataset.
AI platforms combined accounted for 0.33% of traffic as of April, up from 0.1976% a year earlier. Within that, ChatGPT generated 78.23% of AI-referred traffic across the full 16-month period. Perplexity follows at 9.33%, Gemini at 6.85%, and Copilot at 3.57%. Claude accounts for 1.40%.
Between January and April, ChatGPT’s referral traffic grew 1.53% while Gemini grew 63%. The same dataset showed Gemini passing Perplexity earlier this year.
How SE Ranking Explains The March Jump
SE Ranking ties the March increase to public attention on Anthropic in February. Anthropic said publicly it wouldn’t allow Claude to be used for mass surveillance of Americans or fully autonomous weapons. The statement came during a dispute with the Pentagon over Claude’s usage restrictions.
The report points to outside figures that move in the same direction. It cites Similarweb data showing that Claude reached 11.3 million daily active users on mobile in early March. Ramp’s AI Index, based on corporate spend data, reported Anthropic adoption at 34.4% of businesses in its data, compared with 32.3% for OpenAI.
The Report Doesn’t Mention OpenClaw
One thing missing from SE Ranking’s analysis is OpenClaw, the open-source agent framework that runs on Claude models.
OpenClaw was one of the biggest Claude-related stories of the same window. It launched in November and hit 247,000 GitHub stars by early March. Observers called it the fastest-growing project in GitHub’s history. Anthropic restricted subscription access for third-party harnesses, starting with OpenClaw, on April 4.
That’s additional context rather than an explanation for the referral numbers. Agent activity doesn’t show up as clicks from claude.ai to websites, so OpenClaw usage wouldn’t register in this dataset. It’s one more type of Claude activity that referral reports can’t see.
The US Is About Ten Months Ahead
The growth pattern looks similar across regions in the dataset, but the US leads on both scale and timing.
In April, Claude accounted for 0.0186% of US website traffic in the dataset. The EU figure was 0.0100%, and the UK was at 0.0054%.
US websites reached a Claude traffic share of 0.0022% in April 2025. Other regions didn’t hit a similar level until early 2026, roughly ten months later.
Why This Matters
The percentage increase makes the growth appear larger than the traffic behind it. A near-4x increase still leaves Claude with a small fraction of referral traffic. The numbers serve as an early signal to watch, not something to react to just yet.
SE Ranking notes that its data captures only direct clicks from AI platforms, and that Claude is used mainly for writing, coding, and analysis, not search.
Looking Ahead
The next monthly updates will show whether Claude’s March jump was a new baseline or a spike. If it holds, sites with US audiences will likely feel any change first. Positions have already moved this year, with Gemini passing Perplexity in the same dataset.
Featured Image: Blossom Stock Studio/Shutterstock
